Search form

Co-Directed by Phyllis Leffler & Julian Bond

Main menu

16th Street Baptist Church

The church was founded in 1873 as the first black church in Birmingham, Alabama, and became a social center, hosting such notable black figures as W. E. B. Du Bois and Mary McLeod Bethune. It was an organizational center for many of the meetings and rallies of the civil rights era and was bombed by racially motivated terrorists in 1963, killing four young girls.